Review: you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love

“Feminine intuition” may not be a perfect compass, but it led Olivia Rodrigo here, and here is a good place.

The Filipina-American female former acolyte of Taylor Swift has shed the rock-chick cosplaying and come into her own on the unfortunately-named “you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love,” which was a factor in this reviewer’s 3-star review of her work, because a title is supposed to be a capture of the whole work, and in this case, the title is an overlong hindrance from understanding it. 

Which is to say that my rating could have been even higher had the album had a better title. 

Better titles would have been closer to her former works, better titles which introduce worse songs: SOUR was a teenage title for teenage songcraft; GUTS was a bloody title for an album with vampires and shrieking. 

Maybe this album’s title could have been EXES.

The opener “drop dead” suggests “Teenage Dream” with its synthetic riffs leading into a bellicose chorus – although Olivia is really fighting with herself and her feelings, not with anyone else.  Her strengths have always been her identification with her lusts, feelings, and depravities – she is the definition of a first-person storyteller, whereas Taylor Swift is more third-person. 

Who could forget how she got started with her musical career?  With that line in “driver’s license,” – “with that blond girl / who always made me doubt” envisioning a racial inequality representative of every minority’s temptation of inadequacy, which every minority in America has to deal with at some point or another. 

Thank goodness Olivia is no longer making (as many) careless bad decisions as the poor girl on GUTS, as “the cure,” an album standout, shares wisdom of knowledge that her new relationship “will never be the cure” to a hideous ex.

Olivia Rodrigo would never admit it, but she is at her best when she is a bit of a moralist.  Perhaps it was her Christian upbringing or her start as a child actress in a age when everybody is deconstructing child actresses, but that past guides her as a bit of a guide for young girls and teenagers to have high standards and not to give themselves to any dark-haired, light-eyed older man. 

Love should feel like parts of the first half of this lustrous album, with cymbals and thrills in “you + me = <3” and the feeling of overwhelming stupidity in “stupid song” where the 26-year old girl regrets ever dating someone else.

Love should also proceed with caution, and careful preparation, as Olivia wails in “less,” “if loving me means crying on the curb at LAX / Well, then I guess / I wish, I wish, I wish you loved me less.”

Her analogies are candid and verbose.  Her anguish is sympathetic without being shrill.  And her start-slow, build-up production, reminiscent of Coldplay’s eminent “Fix You,” that pervades through the album allows her to play with well-timed interjections at just the right time: “But it don't matter how your love feels anymore / it will never be the cure.”

Never mind the babydoll dress.  Olivia Rodrigo is home and in her space and we’re all just pulled along for the ride.

3 stars.